The Sunday AI Review: 25th September to 1st October 2017

Good morning, my little cyborgs!

Here we are again – another Sunday, another week of AI news, and – yes – another cracking dose of the Sunday AI Review for you. This weekend is one of those which I look forward to all month… my peaceful night off when Indie goes to her father’s. This Saturday and Sunday, I’m spending my time with Billy and my brother’s dog, Lottie, having lots of autumnal walks and trying not to trip over them and break my neck as they wrestle over a tennis ball in my living room. This is my kind of heaven… the more dogs the better. I also stayed up very late last night finally bingeing on The Handmaid’s Tale, which I’ve been meaning to get into for ages. It’s a good ‘un.

This is the news which has been breaking the internet this week, and not without good reason. The new not-for-profit religious organisation, Way of the Future, has launched with its distinctly wacky manifesto:

“To develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society.”

Silicon Valley engineer, Anthony Levandowski, currently embroiled in a court case between Google and Uber over allegedly stolen tech secrets related to a self-driving car, has been involved in the Way of the Future since its registration in 2015. This may be strange news, but it’s completely intrigued me this week.

Read more about AI and religion here:

Following her appearance on ITV’s This Morning, Samantha the sexbot has been the talk of the town. She appeared on the family-friendly morning TV show resting her cold, lifeless hand affectionately on the knee of her inventor Arran Lee Squire, who boasted that he’d introduced Samantha to his five- and two-year-old kids. Samantha can be put in family-friendly mode and chat about philosophy and make about 1,000 jokes. The important thing to note, actually, is that Samantha is not really AI. She’s just programmed with stock phrases and has some NLP built in. She can’t innovate on thoughts or process big data, or anything really intelligent at all.

Read more about AI and sexbots here:

Oh my God, you guys! This is one extensive, fascinating article. Lots of stuff about the father of deep learning, Geoffrey Hinton, who first talked about back propagation in neural networks back in 1986. He’s now the veritable Elvis of the AI community, based in Toronto where he is the emeritus professor at the University of Toronto. Lots of interesting insight into deep learning here. Thoroughly recommend reading this.

A hologram concierge service powered by a combination of augmented reality and artificial intelligence pushes that virtual assistant and AI-powered customer service into the Star Wars era. I love the idea that holograms are going to become more widespread, and combining them with AI in this way is ingenious. It takes away from that ‘uncanny valley’ factor you get from robotic AI assistance and is also quite novel and aesthetically much more appealing than a robot.

Michele Baker

Michele Baker is the Senior Content Strategist at TDMB. She began her journey into tech marketing via a Masters in Creative Writing, evolving from a prize-winning poet and short story writer to a futuristic content guru. Michele now writes endlessly about all aspects of technology, hosts the TDMB Presents… tech podcast, and speaks at numerous tech and marketing events.